Friday, February 8, 2013

To make sure that every piece of property in Ludhiana is mapped and that their owners pay property tax after it is levied from April 1, the Ludhiana Municipal Corporation started physical verification every building in the city on Wednesday. The process is the second step after satellite mapping was completed by Punjab Remote Sensing Centre (PRSC), Punjab Agricultural University, to ensure that not a single building or plot is missed.

The civic body has given the contract for physical verification to PRSC and has given it 60 days to complete the process and obtain required information.

To assess property tax, the city has been divided into eight zones and each zone will have a different unit value depending on the committee headed by DC, which will fix the values.

The remote sensing centre is also allotting unique identification number to each property in the city and once the property comes under ambit of property tax, house tax will be automatically abolished.

P S Ghuman, joint commissioner, talking to Newsline, said, “Remote sensing centre members have already started physical verification on Wednesday from block numbers 26 (Feroze gandhi market, Lajpat Nagar, New Lajpat Nagar and adjoining areas) and 36 (Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar and adjoining areas). Residents are being asked information like name of owner, full address, water ID, how old is building, rent and others and this information will not be used only in process of property tax assessment but also in other new schemes of MC. Physical verification is one of the components of mapping the whole city.”

“Remote sensing is a secret process and MC will get the collective data after every one week of house visits, ” said Ghuman adding that ‘target is to complete process in 60 days’.